You must agree with all the following Rules to participate on these Forums. If you don't agree with them, please don't post!

MOST IMPORTANT: POLITENESS

These are "family-friendly" forums visited by people of all nationalities, races, ages and backgrounds. These rules (and especially the rules on politeness) are intended to maintain this "family-friendly" atmosphere.

* Keep the tone and content of your posts respectful and polite (even if you're angry about something).

* Rudeness and vulgar language have no place on these forums.

* Do not attack, harrass, threaten or insult other forum members or email service representatives, either in public or via PM.

* Do not try to get around the "profanity filters".

THE OTHER RULES

B) Moderation decisions are FINAL. If a post has been edited or deleted, a thread locked, a member or service banned etc., that particular issue is closed. Do not post to debate moderator action or to second-guess potential moderator action.

C) No advertising, and no private message spam. No affiliate links.

D) If you represent an email service provider, make this clear in your very first post. Do not pretend to be a "satisfied user" if you in fact work for the service you are discussing as this type of deceit will result in both you and your service being banned.

E) No signatures [except optionally your name]

F) No discussion of illegal activities [hacking, software piracy, theft etc.]. No links to illegal activities, or information on how to find sites that discuss illegal activities.

G) If you have an email problem or question, be as specific as you can. What happened? How did it happen? What service were you using? The more information you provide, the easier it is for other forum members to help you.

H) Do not post the same information two or more times to different Forums (no "cross-posting").

I) Stay on topic. Use the Off-Topic forum for discussions unrelated to email!

J) Post to the most appropriate forum. Fastmail, Runbox and Gmail all have their own forums, so if your post relates to one of them, please use their forums.

K) No references to adult sites, or links to adult sites [including Profile links]. You will generally be banned without a warning for breaking this rule.

L) No discussion of religions or religious philosophies, cultural differences, sex, sexual orientation, freedom of speech, politics and governments. No links to sites or pages specifically about these topics.

M) No sexism or racism

N) Do not ask other Forum members for any personally identifiable information (their full name, their address, how old they are etc.) either publicly or via PM, unless they volunteer that information themselves.

O) Don't post copyrighted content (e.g. news articles) without the permission of the copyright owner. Post the headline, and link to the article instead, or post a brief excerpt.

P) The Off-Topic Forum is for discussions about non-email topics that would be of interest to the general membership. As long as topics adhere to all of these Rules, this can include anything that is not very personal in nature. Issues and problems you would normally discuss with your doctor, psychologist, religious/spiritual leader, guidance counsellor, lawyer, or close friends and family members do not belong in the Off-Topic Forum, or anywhere else on this site.

Q) When in doubt, DO NOT POST!

R) Finally, ignorance is no excuse. It is a requirement of Forum participation that all members read and agreed with these Rules. It's a total waste of time saying "I didn't read them" after an issue is raised!

ENFORCEMENT OF THESE RULES

Where possible, a single warning will be issued (either within the problem thread, or via PM or email) if a member breaks a rule.

If this warning is ignored, the member will most likely be banned and locked out of the Forums.

NOTE: At the discretion of the moderation team and myself, no such warning will be issued - members will be banned immediately.

There have been a lot of spam-related discussions recently, so I believe it's time for some official guidance on what can and can't be discussed in these Forums.

CANNOT BE DISCUSSED
- Specific spam reports of any kind. In other words, you may NOT report an individual spam message on these Forums, nor report the specific email address used to send or receive feedback from a spam message, or the site(s) being advertised in a spam message.
- Any concepts, ideas, suggestions etc. relating to taking "revenge" against spammers. This includes links to articles/sites suggesting ways of exacting such revenge
- Any spam filter code snippets that contain language inappropriate to the family-friendly audience of these Forums
- Spam allegedly originating from a particular email provider - this MUST be reported to the appropriate person at that provider, which is generally abuseATproviderdomain (e.g. abuse@example.com)

CAN BE DISCUSSED
- Effective anti-spam tools, techniques, services, filtering methods etc. so long as the discussion doesn't veer off into any of the "CANNOT BE DISCUSSED" areas outlined above
- Questions about the anti-spam tools offered by a given email provider
- OFFICIAL reports about scams, significant email worms/viruses and so on. An "official" report is one issued by either a reputable news site or by a major anti-virus or similar organization. Always link to the report when discussing it - do not repost the full text of the report.
- General interest news about spam, such as news report on the expected growth in spam (again, please link rather than reposting the entire article)

The above rules should be enough for now, but I reserve the right to "tweak" them should instances arise that are not covered by the above.

A FINAL WORD
Please always remember that these Forums are not the appropriate place to report specific spam (even if the provider in question has a forum or representative here). Always use the appropriate private reporting channels for that provider when reporting spam problems.